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"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again (blog.privacyguides.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.

It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
Those of us that fight against ads, tracking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)

If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically "can" run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don't really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.

I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we've already lost on that front.

[+] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

i read that as more like "nobody would opt in if it was opt-in".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging

It's not that difficult to explain. "When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you've seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N"

But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I've seen? No, thanks.

If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I've blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.

The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We'll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they'll reconsider.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

Let's not forget when they shipped a full page ad for a Disney movie into a browser update

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

To disable:

user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Alternatively you can do the same through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Website Advertising Preferences and uncheck "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

Yup, but that's already mentioned in the article. Thought I'd give people the exact userpref, so they can modify their custom user.js if they have one.